Frank Gaffney: ‘We Have a Fifth Column, Sharia-Adherent Part of Muslim Community’

APPablo Martinez Monsivais29 Jun 2016

Center for Security Policy founder Frank Gaffney joined Breitbart News Daily on Wednesday morning to talk about what SiriusXM host Stephen K. Bannon aptly described as a “monster day” on Tuesday, including the release of the House Benghazi Committee report, Senator Ted Cruz’s panel on the Administration’s politically correct blindness to radical Islam, and radical Islam’s devastating attack on the Ataturk International Airport in Turkey.

Bannon noted that while American liberals scrambled to re-frame the Orlando massacre in the context of their favorite issues — gun control, “hate crimes” against gays, anything except radical Islam — the Turks appear to be taking the Istanbul slaughter more seriously.

“They are. They have to,” Gaffney agreed. “But in part, this is a ‘mafia war’ in Turkey. You’ve got Islamists in the government. You’ve got Islamists blowing up assets of the government, like the Istanbul airport. They’re rivals for the caliphate. Erdogan seeks exactly as the Islamic State does.”

Bannon pointed out the significance of the airport as a target for ISIS, as it’s named after Kemal Ataturk, the Turkish leader who decisively moved his country away from dreams of a conquest-minded Muslim “caliphate,” and into modernity.

Gaffney added there was “an intermediate step in 1928 — the Muslim Brotherhood started the resurgency to re-establish the caliphate in Egypt.”

“The Islamic State is just one of the outcroppings of the Muslim Brotherhood’s operations,” said Gaffney, pronouncing it “troubling” that America’s national security apparatus has been “turning a blind eye, a willful blindness” to these ideological connections.

“What’s going on in Turkey, the efforts of Erdogan to very explicitly re-establish the Caliphate under his dominion in Turkey, is now bumping up against other aspirants, as you say,” Gaffney continued. “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in Syria and Iraq, has been trying to get his own thing started, and has got outcroppings of his caliphate in Boko Haram, and Libya now, and elsewhere.”

“The key matter here is, this is a global jihad movement,” he warned. “Whether it’s one franchise or another, they aspire to the same thing — Sunni and Shia alike, by the way. We keep ignoring that at our extreme peril.”

“The Turks are reaping the whirlwind of what they have sowed in encouraging the Islamic State, which they have done a lot of over the years, but now they are finding themselves fighting for territory,” he said.

Gaffney said the Obama Administration’s refusal to accept the concept of a global jihad movement was the subject of Senator Cruz’s hearing on Tuesday. He added:

This willful blindness on the part of the government – I think to some extent, frankly, it started under George W. Bush, and it’s become infinitely worse under this Administration. Partly, unfortunately, I think there is a certain sympathy on the part of this President for, if not for the guys who are engaged overtly in the violent jihad, certainly in the guys who believe in the supremacy of Islam, and this notion that it can be accomplished through stealthy means.

When Bannon bluntly asked if a “fifth column” of Islamic supremacists has developed in the U.S. government and media, Gaffney replied, “We have a fifth column in the form of the sharia-adherent part of the Muslim community— and whether it’s in the government, whether it’s in our churches, whether it’s in our financial sector with sharia-compliant finances,whether it’s in the media, whether it’s in all of our other civic society institutions, it is at work.”

“The part that’s particularly troubling about the government — and to some extent, we saw it in the whole Benghazi scandal, which of course was the subject of the report that came out yesterday, and another report that my colleague Clare Lopez and others from the Citizen’s Committee on Benghazi will be releasing today. This fifth column has, in fact, enabled the Muslim Brotherhood specifically, other Islamic supremacists, to obscure what they’re doing, and to inexorably take us down,” Gaffney said.

He said the goal of this fifth column was to create the infrastructure for the kind of attacks seen in Turkey, Orlando, and San Bernardino. “We’ll wind up, I think, looking back on this period with the same kind of incredulity that people now look back on, in the run-up to World War II,” he predicted. “What were they thinking? Why did they let this happen?”

Gaffney and Lopez have collaborated on a book, See No Sharia: ‘Countering Violent Extremism’ and the Disarming of America’s First Line of Defense, which he said provides “chapter and verse on how this is happening to our country, how that fifth column inside the government has taken us down with something they call ‘Countering Violent Extremism.’” He also strongly recommended reviewing the findings from Senator Cruz’s hearing on the subject.